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Join us for a Tweetchat on women in leadership roles

By Katie Stanton

This Thursday, July 28, at 1 p.m. ET, Vital Voices will be hosting an hour-long chat via Twitter on women, foreign policy and leadership.

A Tweetchat, an online chat conducted via Twitter, is centered around a hashtag -- our hashtag is #VVlead, and you may use it whenever you'd like to discuss women and leadership on Twitter.

Our first chat is in response to the recent Foreign Policy article by Micah Zenko: City of Men. The piece revealed that, in 10 prominent thinktanks with a foreign policy focus, women constituted only “21 percent of the policy-related positions (154 of 723) and only 29 percent of the total leadership staff (250 of 874).” The numbers continue along the same vein with regard to political science and international relations professors, the Pentagon and U.S. embassies, and officers in the U.S. military.

We ask: What are we losing as a result of women’s underrepresentation in leadership? This question is the same one asked by Heather Hurlburt in her response piece, Foreign Policy: The Feminine Realpolitik. She writes,

...[W]e face a straightforward loss in the 'war for talent.' With American women now a majority of college graduates, receiving an ever-larger proportion of postgraduate degrees, and outperforming men academically, we're missing brainpower if they don't form a significant part of our national security infrastructure."

To participate in the chat and ask your own questions, use your Twitter account to log in to Tweetchat here. if you do not have a Twitter account, you can create one.